Google Has a Striking History of Bias Against Black Girls • Hacker News Board

Re: Google Has a Striking History of Bias Against Black Girls

#221

Post by danso » Wed, Mar 28, 2018, 10:49 PM UTC

MichaelGG wrote: post #218

danso wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google Search is arguably just a mirror. And ideally, that's what it should be. I disagree this is the ideal. The first implementation of PageRank makes a very big assumption: that people who write webpages and control websites can be trusted to link to worthwhile content. If webmasters and web producers skew a certain way, then PageRank/BackRub will also skew that way. Google original mission statement was "to org…

No, Google does not try to mirror content. It tries to provide the best results for users. Results the user wants to click on and are relevant. Searching for "professor style", nobody wants it to return a minority professor style. Even she doesn't, at scale. If she and others did, they'd be Googling "professor style", not clicking, then Googling "professor style for black women" and results would improve/personalize.…

Sorry, just to clarify, I (and I believe the GP did as well) meant "mirror" in terms of reflecting reality and the state of things -- not "mirror" as it's commonly thought of in content/data online distribution.

I think you misread the Holocaust denial situation. The reason why "Did the Holocaust happen?" was so problematic was because that literal string of text is something that you'd never find on a mainstream site, such as the NYT or the Holocaust museum. And yet sites like StormFront would get bonus SERP for using that literal text in a page's title, url slug, and . StormFront benefited from a blind spot in Google's heuristics that had little to do with whether or not StormFront was actually a legitimate researcher into the question of the Holocaust's historical reality.

Same problem with Google Bombs. A law student with a blog was able to get enough people to link "waffle" to 2004 presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry [0]. Presumably, the average person googling "waffle" wants the food item, not info about Sen. Kerry. But the reality was that the metrics Google had long used to measure quality and credibility were all saying "waffle => Kerry".

Staying true to the algorithm assumes that the algorithm (and its inputs) were pure and complete to begin with. This is not necessarily the case.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_Google_bombs_in_the_...

Re: Google Has a Striking History of Bias Against Black Girls

#222

Post by shawndrost » Wed, Mar 28, 2018, 10:49 PM UTC

labster wrote: post #147

I think the thesis is wrong here. Google has a striking history of removing bias against black women. People make content for the web. People are racist, and make lots of racist assumptions in their writing. Society is racist. This results in Google's algorithms reflecting the corpus they scanned, and the searches that are made. But the search is just a reflection of us, and how terrible we all are. Google gets embar…

Your second paragraph explains why Google, the search tool, has a striking history of bias against black women, by stating "search is a reflection of [..] how terrible we are". Your third paragraph explains that Google, the company, spends time and money on correcting bias.

I don't think that's news to the author, or a refutation. She says tech companies produce tools in environments of racism/sexism, without proper safeguards, and the result is damaging to people of color and women. She's saying Google can and should consider this stuff in advance, and take responsibility for bias in their products (even when it's the reflection of ugliness in third parties as you said).

So, I don't see your perspective as being in conflict with her. Except inasmuch as you excuse Google for reflecting our biases. Do you think they should feel OK if their next AI winds up with our biases? If so, why? It doesn't feel like you've explained that.

Re: Google Has a Striking History of Bias Against Black Girls

#223

Post by tux1968 » Wed, Mar 28, 2018, 11:02 PM UTC

ucaetano wrote: post #216

tux1968 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There isn't just a risk of picking up biases -- there is an absolute guarantee that biases exist and always will. In a sense that's the whole goal when giving _relevant_ results. The idea is to return information biased towards interesting and useful results. I wish Google wasn't biased against the restaurant around the corner from me when I search for "The Trumpet", but it is. That's as it should be of course, since…

> Doing it manually as you suggest is likely hopeless and more politically fraught. Yes, but, sadly, necessary.

Disagree that there is any necessity at all -- the supposed cure will be worse than the disease.

Re: Google Has a Striking History of Bias Against Black Girls

#224

Post by pishpash » Wed, Mar 28, 2018, 11:06 PM UTC

mirimir wrote: post #220

danso wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google Search is arguably just a mirror. And ideally, that's what it should be. I disagree this is the ideal. The first implementation of PageRank makes a very big assumption: that people who write webpages and control websites can be trusted to link to worthwhile content. If webmasters and web producers skew a certain way, then PageRank/BackRub will also skew that way. Google original mission statement was "to org…

Well, I'd like some search service that shows me what's accurately out there. If there's content out there about somebody being a "miserable failure" or Holocaust denial, I want to see it. I mean, what good is a search service that doesn't show what's there? If I don't want to see whatever results are useless or offensive, I'll do my own filtering. But then, I grew up on searching the scientific literature using Scie…

Where are the filters that show which search demographics contributed to a result being relevant? I could use that to filter out SEO's, googlebombs, racist results, etc., if I wanted.

Re: Google Has a Striking History of Bias Against Black Girls

#225

Post by danso » Wed, Mar 28, 2018, 11:10 PM UTC

mirimir wrote: post #220

danso wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google Search is arguably just a mirror. And ideally, that's what it should be. I disagree this is the ideal. The first implementation of PageRank makes a very big assumption: that people who write webpages and control websites can be trusted to link to worthwhile content. If webmasters and web producers skew a certain way, then PageRank/BackRub will also skew that way. Google original mission statement was "to org…

Well, I'd like some search service that shows me what's accurately out there. If there's content out there about somebody being a "miserable failure" or Holocaust denial, I want to see it. I mean, what good is a search service that doesn't show what's there? If I don't want to see whatever results are useless or offensive, I'll do my own filtering. But then, I grew up on searching the scientific literature using Scie…

> I'd like some search service that shows me what's accurately out there

What does that mean, to accurately depict what's "out there"? That could be as nonsensical and unproductive as completely killing the spam filter in your email. Do you feel that that GMail and other modern-spam-detecting solutions have given you an inaccurate view of the "real" mail you are getting?

By the late 2000s, content farms such as Demand Media were churning out clickbait that followed the best practices with SEO. Demand Media [0] consistently beat out the NYT on SERP, thanks in part to a store of 1 million domain names used to serve up ads and links for topics ("howtomakeasandwich.com" would like to junk articles about sandwiches). By 2010, DM had 105 million unique visitors a month [0] and reached a market cap of $2B. The NYT, by comparison, had about 32M unique monthly visitors [1] -- across all of its properties (BostonGlobe.com, etc), and its market cap in 2011 was about $1.5B [1].

Demand Media beat the living shit out of NYT and every other quality media site by playing to the the known heuristics of Google's SERP. Every other media company had the opportunity and resources to play spamlord. Apparently they didn't, and by 2011 no other media company was positioned to create content (of any quality) with the scalable efficiency of Demand Media.

Google could have just accepted that "might makes right", but that is not an objective/neutral decision, nevermind a rational one.

[0] http://variety.com/2013/biz/news/epic-fail-the-rise-and-fall...

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/12/it-cost...

Re: Google Has a Striking History of Bias Against Black Girls

#226

Post by stagbeetle » Wed, Mar 28, 2018, 11:14 PM UTC

yongjik wrote: post #59

This is a much harder problem that it looks to a casual observer. Just imagine what kind of people would type "black girls" to Google search. Not "black girls outfit", not "black girls social bias", just "black girls". I'll bet at least 50% of the searchers are looking for porn. So even if Google had infinite resources, its choices are: (1) act as a moral authority and deny pornographic contents to those who are look…

I think anyone that's looking for porn on Google is too lost to save. Polite society has moved on to better SERPs like Bing, Yandex, and thou that shalt not be shared.

And that more than 90% of all searches with "girl" are for porn. Google already killed most of its porn-lovin' demographic with the beheading of Google Videos in ~2009.

Also, I don't understand what you're trying to say here. I'm reading sentences, and I comprehend them, but there lacks an overarching idea to bring it all together.

Re: Google Has a Striking History of Bias Against Black Girls

#227

Post by mirimir » Wed, Mar 28, 2018, 11:15 PM UTC

danso wrote: post #221

MichaelGG wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, Google does not try to mirror content. It tries to provide the best results for users. Results the user wants to click on and are relevant. Searching for "professor style", nobody wants it to return a minority professor style. Even she doesn't, at scale. If she and others did, they'd be Googling "professor style", not clicking, then Googling "professor style for black women" and results would improve/personalize.…

Sorry, just to clarify, I (and I believe the GP did as well) meant "mirror" in terms of reflecting reality and the state of things -- not "mirror" as it's commonly thought of in content/data online distribution. I think you misread the Holocaust denial situation. The reason why "Did the Holocaust happen?" was so problematic was because that literal string of text is something that you'd never find on a mainstream sit…

> Sorry, just to clarify, I (and I believe the GP did as well) meant "mirror" in terms of reflecting reality and the state of things -- not "mirror" as it's commonly thought of in content/data online distribution.

Yes, I did. But I don't want to see the parasitic SEO-driven copypasta linkfarms. Or perhaps have them, but including such flags.

Re: Google Has a Striking History of Bias Against Black Girls

#228

Post by notahacker » Wed, Mar 28, 2018, 11:20 PM UTC

mirimir wrote: post #220

danso wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google Search is arguably just a mirror. And ideally, that's what it should be. I disagree this is the ideal. The first implementation of PageRank makes a very big assumption: that people who write webpages and control websites can be trusted to link to worthwhile content. If webmasters and web producers skew a certain way, then PageRank/BackRub will also skew that way. Google original mission statement was "to org…

Well, I'd like some search service that shows me what's accurately out there. If there's content out there about somebody being a "miserable failure" or Holocaust denial, I want to see it. I mean, what good is a search service that doesn't show what's there? If I don't want to see whatever results are useless or offensive, I'll do my own filtering. But then, I grew up on searching the scientific literature using Scie…

The Science Citation Index and LexisNexis already do most of the filtering for you by not including absolute unmitigated garbage that happens to be perfectly optimised for your search keywords. You might find the odd David Irving article in there, but you haven't got Stormfront trying to citation-bomb all holocaust related terms for the lolz, never mind commercial blogspam. And Google also works on the assumption most users won't do their own filtering.

Re: Google Has a Striking History of Bias Against Black Girls

#229

Post by naasking » Wed, Mar 28, 2018, 11:23 PM UTC

danso wrote: post #183

labster wrote: post #147

I think the thesis is wrong here. Google has a striking history of removing bias against black women. People make content for the web. People are racist, and make lots of racist assumptions in their writing. Society is racist. This results in Google's algorithms reflecting the corpus they scanned, and the searches that are made. But the search is just a reflection of us, and how terrible we all are. Google gets embar…

I agree that there's too much blame-the-algorithm sentiment here, but if I had to guess, I'd think the author would argue that these racist biases should and could have been caught before going into production -- i.e. it doesn't have to be an inevitable cycle of ad hoc public shaming and repentance. These biases could be identified just as other SERP problems are identified before each algorithm update. Just like the…

> I'd think the author would argue that these racist biases should and could have been caught before going into production

I think people who believe this significantly underestimate the difficulty of solving these problems.

Re: Google Has a Striking History of Bias Against Black Girls

#230

Post by brighteyes » Wed, Mar 28, 2018, 11:29 PM UTC

grzm wrote: post #192

brighteyes wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You raise an interesting point, but the comment was about the article itself and the thesis in the article.

FWIW, I read the article as addressing the issue in general. The headline and lead-in are Google-specific (as well as many of the examples), which is unfortunate in the sense that it's arguably click-baity and leads to arguments like this, that the thesis is wrong because it's not just Google. I understand why it's done, as providing a familiar, well-understood context helps people better understand what the author i…

rayiner wasn't just bringing up Google vs other companies, though.

rayiner was saying that there is a "coupled system" and Google just reflects external racism, and then Google's search results amplify racism. The article did not mention anything about those interesting points, which might be worthy of bringing up and discussing, but it seems very unfair to accuse the top comment of "not getting the point" about them, when they are rayiner's insights that were only now presented.